OMA/Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV Headquarters (2002-8) is rising triumphantly against the backdrop of Beijing’s rapidly transforming skyline. Joining it on the other side of the city is the much-famed Olympic Stadium “Bird’s Nest” (2002-8) of Herzog and de Meuron. At the same time, Zaha Hadid’s design project for the Guangzhou Opera House (2003- ) is the architectural world’s “talk of the town” for its aesthetics and structural challenge. In Japan, Herzog and de Meuron's Prada Building (2003), Jean Nouvel's Dentsu Headquarters (1998-2002), and Renzo Piano's Hermes Building (1998-2002) have all pushed the possibilities of glass to new heights, and Steven Holl's Nexus World Housing in Fukuoka, Japan, transformed the trajectory of his own career. Meanwhile, architects such as Yung Ho Chang/Atelier FCJZ, Qingyun Ma/MADA s.p.a.m., and Hitoshi Abe/A-Slash are questioning the transformation of Asia through both their own designs and architectural education in the United States (MIT, USC, UCLA). The architectural boom in the past decade has inevitably shifted the field’s geographical concentration from Europe and North America to the Asian Pacific Rim.

This geo-architectural shift simultaneously raises significant theoretical questions about positioning East Asia in the global discourse of modern architecture. Is prospering East Asia the future, the other modern, or simply the land where famous architects deploy their most recent innovations? In a world of increasingly global practice, is architecture defined by the building location or designer’s identity? Should the new architecture in East Asia be identified as modern East Asian architecture, or the tag of regionalism be replaced with contemporary architecture in the age of transnationalism? Proposals on interdisciplinary, comparative aspects, either between geographical regions or between time-periods, are particularly welcome.

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